Avatars have come into popular usage in on-line applications such as gaming and social media applications. The use of avatars provides a means by which users or characters may be identified by others in a virtual setting, such as during online gaming or in social media.
Various means for generating avatars are currently known to the art. One popular method involves selecting predefined characters from an existing set of characters, and then selecting features or characteristics, such as clothing, hair color, sex, and accoutrements which, together, define the appearance of the avatar.
More recently, methods for generating avatars have grown more sophisticated. For example, U.S. 2012/0329561 (Blythe et al.) describes systems and methods that enable the generation of avatars or art from a user's own genetic information. Users may obtain their personal genomic information via direct-to-consumer (DTC) genotyping service or a full resequencing service. The user's genomic profile may be processed by a software algorithm that translates the genotypes into model phenotype descriptions based on a set of reconfigurable rules. Derived from the users' own DNA, phenotype descriptions may be used to create avatars that represent the users in online games and social media applications. Such phenotype descriptions can also be used to create games that are customized to the user, and to generate artwork.
U.S. 2009/0300513 (Nims et al.) describes an avatar or avatar environment which is used to visualize data, and which may be provided within a social networking system or service (for example, as part of the Internet) and/or within a desktop widget, panel, gadget, or the like. The avatar may evolve or alter its appearance, animation, or other visual or audio characteristics in response to the data or other input such as athletic activity performed by a corresponding user. In particular, in one embodiment, the avatar may respond to and provide visualization of athletic or sport performance data.
U.S. 2012/0127164 (Rhee et al.) discloses a processing apparatus for creating an avatar. The processing apparatus calculates skeleton sizes of joints of the avatar and local coordinates corresponding to sensors attached to a target user by minimizing a sum of a difference function and a skeleton prior function. This difference function represents a difference between a forward kinematics function regarding the joints with respect to reference poses of the target user and positions of the sensors, and the skeleton prior function based on statistics of skeleton sizes with respect to reference poses of a plurality of users.
WO/2012/005499 (Joo et al.) discloses a method and an apparatus for generating an avatar. In one embodiment, the method for generating the avatar includes the steps of recognizing an object to be formed as an avatar; generating distinguishing feature information by recognizing a distinguishing feature of the object; generating distinguishing feature metadata including the distinguishing feature information; and generating the avatar using the distinguishing feature metadata. The disclosed method and apparatus distinguish the difference between similar avatars by generating the avatar using an intrinsic feature of each object, which is the distinguishing feature when generating the avatars for the similar objects such as twins.
Other methods for generating avatars are also known to the art. For example, a research team led by Ayellet Tal of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology has developed a method for generating avatars from digital images (see Kevin Hattori, “Making 3D Avatars The Easy Way”, Dec. 1, 2010, published at phys.org). The method may purportedly be used to create undistorted 3D avatars without regard to the proportions of the targeted model. These avatars may then be used in computer games and/or in Internet forums and other online communities.